“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” -Alphonse Karr
The more things change, the more they stay the same, so the saying goes. I often find myself thinking this when reading philosophy from ~300 BC, where great minds are struggling over the same issues in society that I myself am wrestling with. There is a sense of ease for me that this struggle is not something new, nor am I facing it alone.
The same feeling struck me while reading Alan Watt’s brilliant book The Wisdom of Insecurity, a strangely calming tome from an era where people were very anxious – it was written six years after the United States revealed that they had discovered an unbelievably destructive weapon that had ended the Pacific front of World War II and redefined what a show of force looked like. Since the cat was out of the bag (or rather the cow was out of the gate), it could also be used to turn the entire world into a barren, radioactive wasteland. Not fun.
We have plenty to worry about in 2026 on top of nuclear weapons, and our screens and algorithms make sure we are aware of every excruciating detail. An obvious one these days is “AI”, a new restructuring of power and efficiency that has thrown entire fields of research into identity crises and exuberance (mine included).
So it was quite comforting to know that Watts was already tuned into the probability that things like large language models would come into being, in an eerily accurate way, long before modems were in our pockets:
“Already man uses innumerable gadgets to displace the work done by bodily organs in the animals, and it would surely be in line with this tendency to externalize the reasoning functions of the brain–and thus hand over the government of life to electromagnetic monsters. In other words, the interests and goals of rationality are not those of man as a whole organism. If we are to continue to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork.”
Whew! Mr. Watts was never one to mince words, and his thoughts parallel those of the great contemporary thinker Corey Doctorow, warning us to avoid the trap of becoming a “reverse centaur”, again… Watts called it in 1951!
So I am sharing this to join the effort of reminding as many people as possible to maintain their agency, have the courage to be imperfect, learn and grow together, and to remember that a large language model will not invent a new dance unless there is someone instructing it to do so, rather than getting up and dancing spontaneously and experiencing the sheer joy of wiggling their body in an interesting way to the sound of music with their friends.